Rant: High school football recruiting

As I watched the constant stream of shoddy press conferences from high school gyms around the nation on ESPN yesterday afternoon, I felt dirty, as if I was part of a seamy and shameful scam.

Check out Alabama prep star Julio Jones’ press conference and subsequent national television interview to see what I mean. ESPNU.

The headline on that Web site says it all: “Signed, Sealed and Delivered.” National Signing Day was on Tuesday, and it was a big deal for a lot of people.

For those of you who aren’t college football junkies, Signing Day is when universities are allowed to dole out athletic scholarships to the best high school players in the country. It’s like Black Friday, except that instead of early Christmas deals on big screen TVs, human lives are up for grabs.

The chicken, the egg and the endorsement deal

Colleges will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars training, preparing and (allegedly) educating each kid. They will sign anywhere from 15 to 35 of them every year. Add that to the millions spent on coaches and facilities, and the schools hope that the result is a team that wins the national championship. That, in turn, generates millions more for the athletic program.

This is not going where you think it is, by the way. I love college football.

Schools and boosters argue that a successful sports program is part of the overall selling point of a school. In other words, sign stud players, win lots of games, and the school gets better students for the general population.

In the words of the college football junkies, who loiter on sports message boards and treat Signing Day as if it were a national holiday, “I call B.S.”

Sun Tzu would be proud

I love college football. I love the game day atmosphere. And football does put schools on the map.

This, however, has spiraled out of control. It’s not competition anymore. It’s a war of logos and bragging rights.

The schools’ need for their teams to be entertaining and profitable has turned university athletic programs into corporations. They license and protect their brand name, sell ad space on everything that’s nailed down or sober, and have created a full employment program for thousands of washed-up athletes who serve as administrators, coaches, trainers, information directors, and their respective staffs.

It’s an arms race, and everyone is dead even on the back end — big stadiums, highly-paid coaches, cutting edge weight rooms and $75 tickets.

With the same product to offer, they try to get an edge by getting better weapons.

A nation awaits … where a kid will play football for free

And that leads us back to Mr. Jones and the parade of similar Signing Day events all over the country.

On the face of it, it’s exciting. A kid is making a big decision in his life.

But it’s unseemly and exploitative that we’ve gotten to the point where these decisions merit pep rallies that shut down a town and qualify for live, national television coverage.

The nation’s gross domestic product took one for the team yesterday as ESPNU ran these things all day, offering expert analysis after each to project how a 17-year-old kid will perform on a football field in three years. I’m serious.

Fans stayed glued to sports message boards, getting and offering minute-by-minute updates. Or they made allegations of cheating against other schools when their team missed out on a kid. They cussed, they thanked God and they didn’t work.

What the hell was that kid thinking? What the hell are you thinking?

If you think this is okay, shake yourself and take a step back — you, your friends, fans from other schools, newspapers, sports radio stations and ESPN are treating the decisions of these 17-year-old kids as if they were the words of God.

These kids are kids. They are signing letters of intent to try out for a collegiate football team, not inscribing the Ten Commandments on stone tablets.

You love your team (I love my team), but life goes on if the team is 0-12 next year. If a stud QB goes to your bitter rival, so what? It sucks, but you’ll live. If a winless season or crappy recruiting makes you miserable, you have issues.

College football players were already meat on the hoof. Now, thanks to the arms race, they’re being treated as if they were Kobe beef.

They’ll be heading off to college next summer to be fed into the grinder and turned into hamburger for the sake of the team and their dreams of NFL stardom. You will love them until they drop a pass, and then you will hate them.